s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] > Books: society‎ (64)

‘I’d seen the news about the attack: hazy pictures and shaky cellphone footage. Large creatures entering the railway station in the middle of morning rush hour, or a shopping center, or an office building. Nobody knew who they were or where they’d come from. They were described by one reporter as bears., while another claimed they were terrorists dressed up in animal costumes. One witness claimed they were aliens, which had prompted laughter from the journalist.
The attack was serious. Tragic. But it was also far away.
The whole thing was a bit surreal.’

‘Truth doesn’t stop being truth and justice doesn’t stop being justice just because powerful people or politics or institutions tell lies.’

‘it depends what you can imagine. And that does tend to depend on the Zeitgeist of the time, and who and what are influencing a mass imagination.’

‘Social media could do all sorts of good things but that too many people—and more, too many powerful systems—used it vindictively.’

‘[Instrumentarianism is] the social relations that orient the puppet masters to human experience as surveillance capital wields the machines to transform us into means to others’ market ends.’

‘There is a kind of truth that can't be said any other way. I think it finds a way to say the things which are either inarticulable or being stopped from being said or are very, very, very difficult to articulate. I love that about fiction. It is ever, ever hopeful, regardless of its sometimes very dark subject matter.’

‘An agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power…[through] sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structure, a complex of security service…and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation.’

‘So there was the word that made the name, and there was the dog that it conjured in the mind, and there, way beyond it, totally free of it himself, was the real dog, wagging or not wagging his tail. It was me who was tethered to the word.’

‘Because of what you called him, he can be everything and anything. And at the same time his name can mean nothing at all. It’s like you’ve both named him and let him be completely meaning-free!’

‘[P]oetry is language fantasy, a wish made into expression, the same way that drag is the fantasy of the body. Not just what is possible, but against that which is forbidden. A poem transforms paper into hope; drag transforms the body into great beauty and pride, despite social and political op-pression. Both require massive effort. Both can be- not just expressions -but visceral assertions for societal transformation. And both declare: "My name is ________ and I have something to say."
This is the knowledge we share.’

‘I found myself using those words as a placebo for things I could not say like “how are you so desperate to belong when everything looks and smells like you” and “why me? Why do you need to hear this from me?” I used the word “love” when I had nothing else. We were young in the universe. We were young to each other. We only had “love” in English’

‘If ICE’s spreadsheet is meant to deny bodies through abstraction in language, then this poem listens for the body denied, the voice refusing disconnection, abstraction, disappearance.’

‘[Researchers] exposed people to a fake Disneyland pamphlet entitled, 'It's time to remember the magic? The point was to activate childhood memories of a visit to Disney-land. However, there was something odd about the pamphlet: it featured a message from Bugs Bunny - a Warner Brothers cartoon character that couldn't possibly have been present at Disneyland. After exposure to the ad, about 25 to 35 percent of participants claimed to have met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. People offered up specific details too; about 60 per cent of those who claimed to have met Bugs remembered they hugged him, and one individual even recalled Bugs holding a carrot.’

‘Well, yes. But to provoke and enlighten. I did that as a lark. What was exciting was to be forced as a writer not to be lazy and rely on obvious codes. Soon as I say, Black woman . . . I can rest on or provoke predictable responses, but if I leave it out then I have to talk about her in a complicated way—as a person.’

‘We were eight years old and got F’s all the time. Me because I couldn’t remember what I read or what the teacher said. And Roberta because she couldn’t read at all and didn’t even listen to the teacher.’

‘Which version of educational failure is more black? Which kind of poor people eat so poorly—or are so grateful to eat bad food? Poor black folk or poor white folk? Both? As a reader you know there’s something unseemly in these kinds of inquiries, but old habits die hard. You need to know. So you try another angle.’

‘Shoes, dress, everything lovely and summery and rich. I was dying to know what happened to her, how she got from Jimi Hendrix to Annandale, a neighborhood full of doctors and IBM executives. Easy, I thought. Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world.’

‘Yet in many of these instances where this is the case—because as a white person your “race” isn’t one of the impediments to your achieving the good life—the game is still rigged…many are still set up to lose, with little comfort beyond the belief that “at least I’m not Black!”’

‘I didn’t kick her; I didn’t join in with the gar girls and kick that lady, but I sure did want to. We watched and never tried to help her and never called for help. Maggie was my dancing mother. Deaf, I thought, and dumb. Nobody inside. Nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night. . . . And when the gar girls pushed her down, and started roughhousing, I knew she wouldn’t scream, couldn’t—just like me and I was glad about that.’

‘Twyla begins to describe a different binary altogether. Not the familiar one that divides black and white, but the one between those who live within the system—whatever their position may be within it—and those who are cast far outside of it. The unspeakable. The outcast. The forgotten. The nobody.’

‘The shadows of the chessmen
stretch, fall across her: she
is obsessed by history;
each wooden totem rises
like the cairn of an event.’

‘that the whole point
for them
of going round and round
is (faster / slower)
going round and round,’

‘Among the young women now growing up about me I find none with enough imagination to picture the helpless incapacity of the pretty girl of the ’seventies, the girl without money or vocation, seemingly put into the world only to please, and unlearned in any way of maintaining herself there by her own efforts’

‘Many albums and movies can’t be streamed and lie stranded in physical formats, in the tar pit of the past. Hyperlinks to pieces I wrote only a few years ago have already rotted like rope bridges.’

‘It took effort to cultivate our enthusiasms in a desert, but it’s clear now that we took the desert’s role for granted. Knowledge tends to stick when you’ve toiled for it.’

’the Age of Browsing encouraged second chances. Owning physical media forced you to reckon with it, to rewatch it, to appreciate it. (Maybe you sometimes tried too hard to appreciate something, but there are worse sins.) We steeped ourselves in stuff, and the stuff would start to sink in. Art has always required second—and third and fourth—chances to saturate the mind.’

‘To dwell on a single poem, to the exclusion of others, isn’t just okay; it’s a function of devotion. To cling to a work of art—to revisit it, to steep yourself in it—is to approach the state of prayer. It’s to open your mind to the possibility of being tinted. Of being transformed. Streaming platforms, on the other hand, flood the mind. They set it afloat and bear it away—on to the next novelty. They promise abundance but deliver a deluge.’

‘Their pursuit of beauty means lifting, shaping, dieting, dyeing, injecting, slicing, scarring, painting, curling, padding, cutting, starving, concealing and revealing. When women are already socially conditioned to compete with one another, narrowing the ideal only makes the competition more fierce. In one study, 80 percent of women interviewed said that they competed with other women over physical appearance.’

‘I couldn’t reconcile promoting those treatments to young women with my feminism, I was fighting in my head with how I could be a part of the industry in a positive way – how I could wrestle my beliefs with my complicity and my future in the industry. Ultimately, I decided to quit my job.’

‘In my early twenties, it had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place. Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned over.’

‘According to the 2023 Girlguiding report, 81% of girls and young women aged eleven to twenty-one have experienced some form of threatening or upsetting behavior online, compared to 65% in 2018.’

‘Had she ever really understood her husband’s true nature, bound up as it was with that seemingly impenetrable silence? She’d thought, at one time, that it might be revealed in his work…Despite her best efforts, though, his works proved incomprehensible to her. Nothing was revealed.’

‘The very idea that there should be this other side to her, one where she selfishly did as she pleased, was astonishing. Who would have thought she could be so unreasonable.’

‘It’s not difficult to see why a book that exposes this pervasive structural violence might have been received differently by the (mostly older male) literary establishment than by the many Korean women who didn’t consider it “extreme and bizarre” at all. Perhaps the overwhelming focus on The Vegetarian’s aesthetics is a way of avoiding talking about its politics?’

”Wont someone please think of the Arby’s?” seems like a very weird place to put your concern. What America are you mourning? Target wasn’t in the fields, cotton-bloodied hands. Walmart never hung from a tree.

‘True, they were far too near. They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all. They were little mean dwellings painted a chocolate brown. In the garden patches there was nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens and tomato cans. The very smoke coming out of their chimneys was poverty-stricken. Little rags and shreds of smoke, so unlike the great silvery plumes that uncurled from the Sheridans' chimneys. Washerwomen lived in the lane and sweeps and a cobbler, and a man whose house-front was studded all over with minute bird-cages. Children swarmed. When the Sheridans were little they were forbidden to set foot there because of the revolting language and of what they might catch. But since they were grown up, Laura and Laurie on their prowls sometimes walked through. It was disgusting and sordid. They came out with a shudder. But still one must go everywhere; one must see everything. So through they went.’

'Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.'

'We're allowing ourselves to be controlled by "opinion." And that's where propaganda comes in. All right, then. "What propaganda de we all consume on a daily basis that maintains this status quo? Is it harder to maintain in an autocracy or a democracy where we pride ourselves on our intellectual or political freedom? How much propaganda does it take to make you think that implicit submission is what you want? Is it inevitable? Is there a way to protect ourselves from it?'

‘All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing, and why.’

‘ I wanted to mock and satirize, and pop culture became a vehicle to do that. Obviously, I take it to such an absurdist, exhausting degree to depict how brainwashed millennials were by corporate Boomer pop culture.’

‘I think, because a lot of my generation likes to romanticize goth culture—Manson, Nine Inch Nails and stuff—I wanted to expose it for being just another aspect of the ‘bro’ culture. You know, just cause Manson was wearing lipstick and all, it doesn’t change the fact that he was a part of that very male culture.’

’Hollywood glamorized my wrath
I'm the young urban psychopath
I incite murder
For your entertainment
'Cause I needed the money
What's your excuse?
The jokes on you’

‘The media has unfairly scapegoated the music industry and so-called Goth kids and has speculated, with no basis in truth, that artists like myself are in some way to blame. This tragedy was a product of ignorance, hatred and an access to guns. I hope the media's irresponsible finger-pointing doesn't create more discrimination against kids who look different.’

‘My book did not break [these teenagers] or turn them into killers; they found something in my book that spoke to them, because they were already broken…Yet I did see ‘Rage’ as a possible accelerant, which is why I pulled it from sale. You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it.’

‘We realized it was impossible to protect any one place if the place next door was drowning or on fire. We realized the old boundaries weren’t meant to keep the undesirables out, but to hoard resources within, And the hoarders were the core of the problem.’

‘Dust was in his nostrils, sharp and terrible, and the feet of saints, shaking the floor beneath him, raised small clouds of dust that filmed his mouth. He heard their cries, so far, so high above him—he could never rise that far. He was like a rock, a dead man's body, a dying bird, fallen from an awful height; something that had no power of itself, any more, to turn.’

‘He did not know why, but there arose in him an exultation and a sense of power, and he ran up the hill like an engine, or a madman, willing to throw himself headlong into the city that glowed before him. But when he reached the summit he paused; he stood on the crest of the hill, hands clasped beneath his chin, looking down. Then he, John, felt like a giant who might crumble this city with his anger.’

‘He changed us…He made us more human, made us connect more to that wild place in ourselves. We are part of nature and he reminded us of that.’

‘I lasted a few days at each job and left just as I was starting to get the hang of it, terrified I would become used to the exploitation…when I worked to someone else, I gave them the most precious thing I had, more precious that my time or body, more precious even than the meaning of the word itself: my dignity.’

‘Reducing life to an Excel spreadsheet felt like a crime. I hate my tool, the specialist axe I used to cut up emotions and memories, the experience and suffering of those people who, at the end of the day, had somehow persuaded life to put up with them all those years.’

‘She knows me, my writing, and my terrain; she knows when the path is flat and when the dunes are variable, and she knows how to take up and translate the landscape of my writing, which in her hands becomes a shared space where the two of us meet. A translated novel is always a co-authorship, and I am lucky to share this with Julia Sanches.’

‘You lose the ability to think of anything but the basics: hunkering down in one place for as long as it takes to eat and then, when the day is done, sheltering in some hole from the dark and the inclement weather. Thousands of years ago, we referred to these holes as caves. Now we call them leisure, exercise, social media. We retreat to our depressing cells and feel smug, convinced we are the lucky ones.’

‘[Characters] living in the same world but separately from each other, like their worlds have somehow become disjointed or broken off each other's worlds. But if they could just step out of themselves, or just hear and see what’s happening right next to their ears and eyes, they’d see it’s the same play they’re all in, the same world, that they’re all part of the same story.’

‘It makes you walk round it, it makes you look through it from different sides, see different things from different positions,. It’s also like seeing inside and outside something at once.’